Dear Mandela United States Screening Tour

This month, the Poverty Initiative, together
with Sleeping Giant Films, National Economic Social Rights
Initiative and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR),
will host two youth leaders from the Abahlali baseMjondolo
(Shackdwellers) movement of South Africa for a month-long
exchange and film tour. AbM leaders, Zodwa Nsibande and
Mnikelo Ndabankulu, are featured in the award-winning film
Dear Mandela. These inspiring leaders will share their
experience and analysis of the largest social movement of
the poor in post apartheid South Africa, and will engage
with young people in 7 cities in a conversation about
innovative leadership, bottom-up democracy, and the role of
the youth in fighting for our human rights to housing,
healthcare and a decent wage.

Beyond the week-long film
run at Indiescreen in Brooklyn, NYC Sept. 21-27, the film
tour will travel to Boston and Chicago, as well as to visit
with leaders in Vermont (Vermont Workers Center), Baltimore
(United Workers), Philadelphia (Media Mobilizing Project),
and Detroit (Michigan Welfare Rights Organization) amongst
others. The tour will end with a visit to Haiti with CCR to
meet earthquake survivors living in displacement camps and
to screen the new Kreyol version of Dear
Mandela.

When the South African government promises
to 'eradicate the slums' and begins to evict shack dwellers
far outside the city, three friends who live in Durban's
vast shantytowns refuse to be moved. DEAR MANDELA follows
their journey from their shacks to the highest court in the
land as they invoke Nelson Mandela's example and become
leaders in a growing social movement. By turns inspiring,
devastating and funny, the film offers a new perspective on
the role that young people can play in political change and
is a fascinating portrait of South Africa coming of
age.

DEAR MANDELA had its World Premiere at the Durban
International Film Festival in South Africa, where it was
awarded the 'Best South African Documentary' prize at the
festival. The jury called DEAR MANDELA: 'A movie about
courage, this documentary is beautifully shot, socially
relevant and still manages to offer humor as it reveals a
growing grassroots political literacy in South Africa's
informal settlements.' DEAR MANDELA has since screened in
cities around the world – in London, Addis Ababa, New
York, Prague, Seoul, Vienna and more. At the same time, the
film is currently touring cities and rural areas across
South Africa throughout 2012. DEAR MANDELA was awarded the
top prize – the Grand Chameleon Award - at the Brooklyn
Film Festival and the top prize – The Golden Butterfly
Award - at the Movies that Matter film festival in The Hague
and was recently nominated for an African Academy
Award.

Screening Tour
Participants

Zodwa Nsibande was elected as the
first General Secretary of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Youth
League on 16 June 2008 and re-elected on 16 June 2009. She
is also the National Administrator of the movement. Zodwa
has been involved in all the activities of the movement but
has played a particularly important role in the annual Back
to School Campaigns, the University of Abahlali
baseMjondolo, resistance to evictions, resistance to
xenophobia, solidarity with comrades who have been arrested,
Haiti solidarity, UnFreedom Day Campaigns, the 2008 City
Wide Shack Fire Summit and preparing for the movements
Annual General Meetings. Zodwa was born in eNhlalakahle in
eMdlovana (Greytown) in 1984 and moved to Kennedy Road in
2003 to be able to further her studies. She studied
Information Technology at Durban Commercial College. In 2005
she and her mother were part of the group of activists that
founded Abahlali baseMjondolo. In 2006 she was very badly
burnt when a paraffin stove exploded and had to drop out of
her studies in her third year.

For Zodwa, the Youth League
“is a space where young leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo
are being groomed so that when their time for leadership
comes they can take on their responsibilities. Leaders are
not born. They are made in struggle. They learn through long
experience in struggle. A leader must know how to listen to
everyone, to create space for everyone to speak, to belong
and to be respected. A leader must know how to be led. A
leader must be able to face repression with courage. What is
important in development is human development whereby a
person must grow in mind and social development whereby a
person must move from a shack to a house. We have seen the
shift in human development. We created this shift ourselves
in our movement. My wish is to now see the shift in social
development. We are still struggling to see this
shift."

Mnikelo Ndabankulu is a founding member of
Abahlali baseMjondolo and was elected as the movement’s
spokesperson on 23 November 2008. He lives in the Foreman
Road settlement where he is Deputy Chairperson of the
Foreman Road Abahlali baseMjondolo Committee. He is 28.
Mnikelo has been involved in all of the movement’s major
mobilisations from planning to action. He has often been
subject to police harassment and on 28 September 2008 he was
arrested on charges of ‘Public Violence’ and
‘Attending an Illegal Gathering’ when he went to visit
13 comrades who were being held at the Sydenham Police
station. He has recently been closely involved in the
struggle to keep Foreman Road electrified. Mnikelo was born
in the Village of Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape on 16 June
1984. Mnikelo first decided to come to Durban in 1997 when
he visited the city for a mathematics competition while he
was still in high school. He stayed in the beautiful side of
the city, in a conference centre in Clairwood, and never saw
the ugly side of the city. He first came to Foreman Road in
1998 during the school holidays to stay with his brother.
When he first saw the Foreman Road settlement he thought it
was an ihoko (pig pen) and that a big umlungu (white person)
was keeping his pigs there. He was completely shocked that
human beings were staying in such a place. In March 2012,
Amnesty International recognized his work with the 'Golden
Butterfly' Human Rights Prize in a ceremony at The Hague in
the Netherlands.

Dara Kell (Dear Mandela co-director) is
an award-winning South African documentary and television
editor. Her editing work includes Academy Award- nominated
‘Jesus Camp’; ‘The Reckoning’ (which premiered at
the Sundance Film Festival) and Emmy Award winner ‘Diamond
at the Rock’. Her clients include National Geographic,
Discovery Network, History Channel and MTV. She was a field
producer for the Amnesty International documentary ‘Human
Rights, Human Needs’ and has edited short films for Human
Rights Watch and the MacArthur Foundation. Dara is also a
media educator and facilitates camera and editing trainings
with grassroots groups across the United States. She
graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of
Journalism in Documentary Filmmaking and Political
Science.

The Poor
People's Alliance: Abahlali baseMjondolo, together with with
Landless People's Movement (Gauteng), the Rural Network
(KwaZulu-Natal) and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign,
is part of the Poor People's Alliance - a unfunded national
network of democratic membership based poor people's
movements.

Egyptian jets bombed Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday, a day after the group there released a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians, drawing Cairo directly into the conflict across its border. More>>

Ambassadors representing two countries under attack from ISIL, Bashar Ja’afari (right) of Syria, and Mohamed Ali Alhakim of Iraq, speak to journalists following the adoption of a Security Council resolution targeting sources of financing for ... More>>

Abdullah Abu Rahma, coordinator of the popular committee in the village of Bil’in where Kayla joined the protests, told ISM: “Kayla came to Palestine to stand in solidarity with us. She marched with us and faced the military that occupies our ... More>>

3 February 2015 – Parents in the United States must vaccinate their children against measles in order to maintain the high levels of immunity necessary in keeping outbreaks of the aggressively contagious virus small and contained, the United Nations World ... More>>

3 February 2015 – For the second time in as many days, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations Security Council have jointly condemned the brutal killing of a civilian by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – this time deploring ... More>>